I don't think so. When you do a rewrite, you have to uncover all use-cases that the the original software was covering. The software was doing A,B as well as C, D, E. When you do the rewrite, you will focus on the truly important use-cases A & B, and only later you figure out that people were really depending on C. Then you implement C, but D&E were really important as well. And before you know it, you're back to where you were before the rewrite: an organically grown codebase that solves A, B, C, D as well as E. The only difference with the original codebase is that it does A&B more efficiently, but C,D,E are bolted on. The original codebase had different biases (maybe C&E).

Google ranks the info, making some stuff come out on top, and some stuff at the bottom. That's Google's claim to fame, and that's why they are targetted. Nobody would care if they would work like a phone book, as the info people want to remove cannot be found. They make it appear on the first page, and that's the problem.

You're wrong here. Google doesn't blindly index. It ranks information, adding a subjective measure of worth to the information. That's why they make money, and that's why they are targetted by this legislation.

Yes, he might very well go to jail after a fair trial. But that will never happen, as he won't get a fair trial. By now, more than a decade after 9/11, the US has sufficient legislation in place to be able to completely avoid fair trials. That's the entire point of the article: Snowden will not get a fair trial. Chances are, he will not get a trial at all. He would be locked up and isolated, and will not be allowed to defend himself in court, because you know, law. It will indeed teach everyone about democracy, and the message is simple: don't screw over the best democracy money can buy. And large parts of the US will cheer: Snowden is obviously a traitor and traitors don't deserve a fair trial, that's for decent folks.

When Google complies, who cares that somebody creates searchable lists? Even if it is Microsoft. For all practical purposes, it would have dissappeared. You are probably a software developer, making the edge case (the information is not gone) dominate the common case (google doesn't show it). That makes bad software, and also bad argumentation.

Sounds like 'murica.

Dude, you are the one confused. The average is commonly used to denote the (arithmetic) mean. But yes, technically speaking there are multiple averages possible. This doesn't make it right to talk about a graph that shows 'the average'. What average? Mean (geometric or arithmetic), median, or mode? There are a few more choices. Talk about bad math.

Well, the word 'maths' didn't really surface before 1911, so I guess it's the English that in this case have introduced a break with tradition. The word was 'math' before.

And I think that Common Core is doing it the wrong way around. First teach the method, then teach the model, if at all needed. The smart kids will have figured out the model simply due to practice, the not-so-smart kids might have a little benefit from being taught the model. Most of them have forgotten when they're 16 though (you know, hormones), but at least they will have the method to fall back on. Rote learning sticks.

Common Core is obviously invented by mathematicians, reasoning from a Platonic ideal. It would have been nice to have first done some science on it, i.e., figure out if it really leads to improved skill and understanding before rolling it out. You need psychologists for that.

I truly am waiting for the first psychological study that will show that Common Core training leads to better arithmetic than skills training does at the age of, say, 50. Because that's the the important bit. People not going into any kind of higher education will simply forget about the concepts. People that have learned algorithms will remember the algorithms, even if the concepts have faded away.

My mother in law of 71 does not have a higher education, and doesn't have a clue about the concepts behind numbers. Old-fashioned education. However, when confronted with a math problem in the supermarket, she beats my 12 year old by a mile. Algorithms and lots of exercise.

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

Not entirely true. Google's claim to fame is not that it can index information, even altavista could do that, it is that it can rank it in a meaningful way. I'm pretty sure this lawsuit wouldn't have come up if Google would have shown this bit of information on page 10, instead of 1. In other words, the Google algorithms have decided that this is the most important bit of information to divulge about this person. And you think it's weird that the person in question wants this to stop?

There's a bit more to that. The Germans are perfectly capable of cooking the books, and perfectly capable of hiding this just enough so that they can offload the bagage to somebody else. The fun part of the crisis in Greece was where Merkel was forcing Greece to keep the Euro and take the money just so long that the German Landesbanken could offload their toxic (but highly profitable) Greek debts to the French banks (backed by the state). This because many German politicians actually own those banks. Clean economy? Not so much. Of course, the French retailiated by pushing more money to Greece so that their banks would not fail. And everyone is happy...

Au contraire. Switzerland needs to keep their end of the bargain, and are therefore subject to many, if not most of the random dictats from Brussels as they refer to free trade. They just don't have the right to influence them, just obey.

Determinism of state is fundamentally at odds with quantum mechanics. But that doesn't preclude the fact that the mind is a machine, as also machines are not deterministic for the same reason.

A && B == C | D

What happens?